Wednesday, January 11, 2012

New Junk Publisher: MASAUM Network

I recently received the following invitation in an e-mail from mjmms@masaumnet.com:

Dear  Colleague

I am glad to invite you as Guest Editor of
MASAUM Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences for year 2012. If you are interested to join us as guest editor, please send us following information ASAP.

Full Name with Title :
Designation:
Affiliation:
City & Country:
Email:
Area of Interest in Research:
Latest Picture (optional):


You are further invited to submit you valuable work for the first issue of the journal. Submission deadline is Jan 05, 2012.

Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.

Managing Editor
MJMSS

 

It struck me as strange that someone would consider me so important as to qualify to be a guest editor of his journal, yet needed me to send him my name.  The reason is obvious: this message was probably spammed to thousands (or more) of my colleagues.

As readers of this blog may know, publishers like this are one of my pet peeves.  So I investigated a bit.  What I found was entertaining.  The publisher's homepage is www.masaumnet.com.  There one learns that "MASAUM Network has a good team of well repute Professors..." but evidently cannot afford to hire someone with the ability to write a grammatically correct sentence in English.  As I expected, the publisher has an online-only, "Open Access" model that really means author-pay.  The cost to publish an article is not terribly high ($200), although in a bizarre twist the price depends on the number of pages (shouldn't it depend on the number of MB?)  Even more entertaining is the fact that their instructions for authors state

Paper submissions are accepted only in Doc format.  Other formats will not be accepted.

That alone guarantees they will not get any serious mathematics submissions.

Today, I received the following highly alarming message:

Dear Colleague

I am glad to inform you that information about you has been added at
www.masaumnet.com/ebmjmss.html.

Please check and confirm information displayed about you.

If correction is needed ,let us know about it.

If information about you has been missing ,please send us following information about you
ASAP.

Full Name with Title :
Designation:
Affiliation:
City & Country:
Email:
Area of Interest in Research:
Latest Picture (optional):


You are further invited to submit you valuable work for the first issue of the journal.

Submission deadline is Jan 15, 2012.

Please forward this to concerned persons.

Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.



shiella Nancy
Chief Coordinator
on the behalf of
Managing Editor
MJMMS

At this point, I myself was a "concerned person"!  So I followed the link and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that my name does not appear anywhere on the page it leads to.  I've let them know in no uncertain terms that they are not authorized to use my name.

31 comments:

  1. David,
    I wanted to thank you for this post. I also received a very special email from masaumnet.com asking for my information. I had my suspicions so I turned to Google search which led me here. I would also like to add that no one should click on any of the links contained in the phishing emails in case the spammer takes a more aggressive route in the future. If you have Gmail you can report the email to Google by clicking the drop down chevron next to "Reply" in the top right of the email and selecting "Report Phishing". I suggest you take similar actions if available with other email providers.

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  2. Interesting perspective. I didn't think of this as a phishing attack since phishing is usually aimed at obtaining private information (like passwords or account numbers) whereas all the requested information in this case is public and could be obtained from my website.

    I don't think the entity send these messages is malicious -- merely unscrupulous and misguided.

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  3. Just another in a long line of BS attempts to profit off the prideful side of normally very smart scholars (especially juniors). I wouldn't attempt to publish in anything without a well-known name (e.g., ACM, USENIX, IEEE, etc) because there is just no upside.

    If you look at http://www.coolwhois.com/d/masaumnet.com, you can see this is a money-making scheme likely originating in Pakistan. What I can't understand is how the desire to publish is able to override the voice of reason when everything (especially the English) points to a scam.

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  4. Thank you for your investigation. I received the same email and was instantly suspicious. Mystery solved! :-)

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  5. Thanks for the headsup. Yours was the first line I checked after getting the inquiry about serving. Relatively unknown groups in Indonesia, Bulgaria and Romania have asked for my services in the past on what turned out to be legitimate invitations, so I thought it was worth checking up.John

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  6. I hope I read your post before I submitted my work to them. I am one of their victims. BTW.. they disappear after they toke the money !!!

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  7. me too they take 350 euro and many hours of works !! after that no responses i discover some faults in the call paper of MICIT 12 and MICIT13 and they lie about the index and the journal factor impact!!


    I hope I read your post before I submitted my work to them. I am one of their victims. BTW.. they disappear after they toke the money !!!

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  8. Thanks for posting. I got the same email too.

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  9. Thank you for your valuable analysis. I got a different
    Ad but there was no mention of money yet.

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  10. Ok, thank you for your post.
    It is a scam. Why, we can stop that ?

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  11. People, I contacted the Editors in the phishing website and some advised me that they have received reports of illegal activities and have asked for their names to be removed but they never heard back.. so BE AWARE and let others know at your university like what I did. I also report it to scam watch in my country.

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  12. Hi, I am one of their victim..but only know masaum is a scam afer read this post..thanks for the clarification..

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  13. Lev B. Levitin, Boston UniversityOctober 22, 2012 at 8:27 AM

    David, thanks for your clarifying information. I received the same invitation as you did, and it looked somehow strange to me. So, I looked up in Google and, fortunately, found your letter. How vigilant should one be our days, indeed.

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  14. I want to know: they said the papers will be published on line, so the question is, how can we find those papers? Can anyone point me to the website?

    The other question is: how can a single person organized so many conferences with only 1 coordinator? We know that to organize a conference, you need many committees. Where is the venue?

    All these questions make me feel very suspicious.. Can someone please enlighten me?

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  15. Wow! Thank goodness for this blog! I've been receiving so many of these MASAUM network emails to my university email address to submit to their conferences, journals, e-books, be an editor, etc. that I had to check the legitimacy, especially given that I am a junior faculty with lots of pressures to publish and on the lookout for publication opportunities, especially in journals.

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  16. Thank you very much, David. I also wanted to find out the truth after receiving their email and reached your blog. Very helpful.

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  17. Wow! I have just received an invitation from Mausaumnet asking for my "cooperation" organizing International Conferences on Management Sciences in Europe:
    Dear Colleague

    I am glad to inform you that MASAUM Network www.masaumnet.com is going to organize international conferences on Management Sciences in USA,UK,UAE,Canada, Malaysia and Singapore in 2013.

    You are invited to join us as member of organizing / technical program committee of these conferences.

    Please send us following information as soon as possible.

    Full Name with Title(Dr,Mr,Ms etc)
    Designation (Professor, Associate Prof, etc)
    Department:
    University:
    City and Country:
    Email:
    Research Interest:
    Latest Picture:

    Please forward this email to interested persons.

    Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.

    Regards;

    Z.cao
    Coordinator
    Management Sciences Section
    MASAUM Network


    After googled it, I found your site and all these interesting comments. Thanks a lot!

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  18. can i have any contact no or email address to contact with any officiall person in Masaum net ?

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  19. anyone who falls for this scam isn't fit to hold a Ph.D. in my opinion. You should NOT be publishing in these venues to start with!!! I have not been able to get myself of the mailing list, so I have started emailing their editorial members at random threatening them with an FCC filing for spam and not obeying with respect to removal; I suppose if they are in Pakistan they don't care, but many of their "editors" are at US 'universities'. It would be great to have a tool that would collectively email every single one of them a request for removal every time you get an email from them ... perhaps I will ask a student to put together a project that will find masaum "editor's" emails and make it available to "mail bomb" them - imagine if we all did that every time, I bet that would get their attention!!!

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  20. follow up - interestingly enough when you dig a little deeper, and so a search for Shiella Nancy, Western Michigan University's address comes up - if you use that address and search with the added term 'masaumnet' a plethora of arab sounding names pop up - all under the same WMU address ...... turns out these people are in Kuwait, at Petra, etc etc. I don't know if masaumnet is affiliated with WMU in any way but I intend to find out so I emailed WMU - awaiting responses and I will post updates when I know more!

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  21. I've been getting emails for a conference for a while now. Did a little digging on the emails and they seem to be originating from an IP address in Pakistan, North-West Frontier. So there's that.

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  22. Here's IP info I looked up. http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation&IpAddress=182.185.45.37

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  23. I've paid to them the fee (100GBP) of the journal in last October 2012. They've promised to publish the journal in 30 Nov 2012. When the times come, I emailed them requesting for the link to access the online journal, then they mentioned they have a technical problem and will be published by 7 Dec 2012. And, today I've emailed them again for the 3rd times, and came out with the message below:

    Hi. This is the qmail-send program at 205.209.97.174.
    I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
    This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

    :
    Unable to switch to /hsphere/local/var/vpopmail/domains/0/i/masaumnet.com: access denied. (#4.3.0)
    I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

    And, I am pretty sure this is totally a scam and a big mistake to me! Actually, MASAUM had sponsored our International Workshop in last June 2012. The extension paper would be published in their MJCS journal.

    How can we 'teach' and 'catch' this scam?

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  24. My guess is that they are most successful when dealing with very junior faculty with limited familiarity with English grammar but great familiarity with their need to "publish or perish".

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  25. There are an e-book published in their web site http://www.masaumnet.com/archives/ebooks/csit/frontiers_in_it/index.html
    but we are waiting for the conferences proceeding and the journals issues
    they are some volumes from 2009 but any online accesses for them !!
    can some one check their contacts in UK and USA?
    http://www.masaumnet.com/contactus.html
    UK:

    Market Place,Dewsbury,West Yorkshire,United Kingdom (UK)

    USA:

    Pembroke Rd,Egg Harbor Township,NJ 08234,New Jersey,United States of America (USA)

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  26. I received the following email. I tagged it immediately as "junk" since I'd never heard of them, even besides the fact that my students want jobs in research or industry, not scientific editing. I Googled the name out of curiosity and came to this blog.

    I pity the desperate people who actually fell for the scam and lost money. This scam only works for people who are unclear on how academia really works.

    ===================
    Dear All

    MASAUM Network http://www.masaumnet.com is one of the leading publishers and event organizers in the world.

    MASAUM Network has started internship program for university students and graduates.There is no restriction on citizenship of the applicants and field of study of the applicants.

    Please visit http://www.masaumnet.com/internships.html for details.

    For more information please contact at masaum.internships@gmail.com.

    Please forward it to concerned persons.

    Regards;

    Brian
    Intership Program Coordinator
    MASAUM Network

    ReplyDelete
  27. I work for a university - Masaum are now targeting uni students who are interested in an 'internship'. It would seem they are now trying to use that avenue to make money from students. Beware!

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  28. Hello,

    You can file complaint vs. MASAUM netowrk on this UK site.

    http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/england.htm

    We could ban their business in UK, and also force Lloyds bank to close their money receiving account.

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  29. Hi guys,

    I went to the police in the London and I told them what happened with me. They asked me to sue this conference to get my money by filling the '' Action Fraud Form'' online. So, please fill this form and ask anyone who had the same story to fill this form. This is the link to this form http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Hi

    I went to the police in the London and I told them what happened with me. They asked me to sue this conference to get my money by filling the '' Action Fraud Form'' online. So, please fill this form and ask anyone who had the same story to fill this form. This is the link to this form

    ReplyDelete
  31. The police asked my to ask you please to fill the report-fraud in this website( http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud ). Please ask your friends here to to do it urgently.

    ReplyDelete